Even Angels Fall

March 03, 2016

No, this is not a religious post. That will
never happen here. It's the name of the song I have been listening to over and
over for couple of days. I love Coldplay. Chris Martin gets me. Corny,
right?

So this song is about this guy who will wait for this girl, till kingdom come.
He is lost, he does not know himself, but as long as the girl will promise to
come and set him free, he knows it will be alright.

Now that is some bullshit that we fall into over and over again.

But then again, isn't this the kind of love we crave for? Other people see love
from above, hover above it, assess the surrounding, carefully eliminate dangers
and possible heartbreaks, then slowly ease down, guided by the winds of common
sense and the agility of levelheadedness. Gently they land in love, no dusting
off required, no quickened heartbeats and near-heart attacks.

Me?

I am the one that falls headfirst and braindead into love. I see love,
sometimes I seeideas of love,
you know,those that could be
love but who really knows...and I dive. I come down hurtling, bumping my head
into clouds of slow-down-mercy, scrapping my knees onto the storms of
recklessness. By the time I hit ground-love, I am a mess of pure ecstasy,
dishevelled and glimmering with bittersweet pain that can only be described as
suicidal rhapsody.

Ifeel. With every single
pore of my skin. This could be termed as borderline obsession, but not in an'I'll kill you then end myself'kind of way. I have tried to explain
this but all I get are blank stares coupled with a very huge urge to reach for
a phone and call help for me.

Let me try explain it.

It is a feeling that starts from a deep crevice of my heart's heart and spreads
slowly into my main heart. It is a slow burning ember that emanates as a
flicker of light. As a candle would from a distance. And as you approach it, it
glows, becomes brighter, bigger... now imagine that light is a fire that does
not burn. It is a warm and gentle blanket, but at the same time, a fire that
doesn't consume you in as much as it envelopes you. For me love is a heart
orgasm. You know that feeling you get when you climax? Now... imagine that for
your heart. Every freaking minute you think, see, feel, touch that person.

I often walk away wounded, bruised and vowing to never fall. Telling myself how
I will make myself a love parachute. Until the next time when I see it from
above 50,000 feet.

February 16, 2016

Last
night I had a dream.In it was a man I do not think about outside a green tuff, leather, and very sweaty 22 men. He is tall, dark, and well, never thought of
him as handsome. Do not get me wrong. He is not bad on eyes, and he does have a
kind of“will grow on you eventually”
look.He’s the kind of man that you meet
and think, he looks like good people, until he gives you a certain look, a
smile - the kind that starts at the corners of his full lips, doesn’t quite
completely break and stops as fast as it began. Then you think about those lips.
And think again.

So last
night I found myself walking in between endless bushes of a luscious tea
plantation. With this man on my side. The dream opened like a movie. Of course,
how else! Establishment shot, two people, a couple, walking next to each other,
surrounded by an endless sea of green.A stretch of the truth here in this dream- the spaces between the bushes
allows for a single file. Oh well, it’s a dream. It was not a lovers stroll,
more like two friends who have known each other a while, the kind that
communicates without saying a word and silence is not lack of words but their
abundance that commands it.Those do
exist, by the way.Move closer, medium shot. She’s all of 5 feet. He’s towering at 6’2. His
head cocks ever so slightly to catch what she is saying. She looks towards him,
but does not look at him. I am now hovering over myself. And Yaya Toure. Even
in my dream I do a double take. Come on! I did not even realize I knew how he
looks like that well. We are talking. About a football match. And he is telling
me how he’s frustrated and misunderstood. I ask Cakegate? I could not resist the urge. He shakes his head
and smirks. It wasn’t about cake; it was
about little things that mean something. From friends.

He plucks
a tealeaf, places it on my palm. We stop and both look at the leaf. I do not
ask, he knows the question, but does not answer it. Yet. He bends and blows it
from my palm. As if hesitant, the leaf slides of my palm, hovers between us for
the shortest second, then ebbs away. You
cannot hold on to things forever Merc. Letting go doesn’t make you weak; it
means you have the strength to build again.

I scoff.

I look
around. No cameras.I am having a
therapy session with a footballer on a very windy day in the middle of a tea
plantation in Limuru. My brain has new definition of mindfuck. I am always game. I decide to engage.

That leaf is not building. It’s
gone to rot. He
smiles. The kind I talked about above. So I think about those lips. And think
again. It’s gone to be useful in its rot.
Because even at your broken, you are still you. Okay, so maybe he is making
sense. Not good grammar, but sense all right. I do not have to be green to be useful. Or beautiful. Even in my rot, I am still me.

Back to
him, I ask. Are you at your rot?He laughs. A genuine laughter. He knows I am
not going to let him pry into me. I am going to jab back. And hard. It’s
getting blusterier, and our voices seem to carry away from us. He pulls his
jacket closer to his body. His arms do not go unnoticed as the thin fabric
stretches across them. I am not
a leaf when I play. Because talent is the whole plant, not part of. The trick
is to know when it’s dry, and when you need to water it more. Otherwise it dies
completely. And then, there are leaves. Part of the whole.

Too
corny; but then again, never thought of life in terms of plants and their
components. Your life is your talent, your essence. What you stand for.That is you, the plant. Other aspects of your
life may change, read rotten leaves but that does not kill the plant. Only you do.

The first
drop of rain hits my forehead. The second my eyelash, forcing me blink. I
haven’t been. We are now face-to-face. Well, not really. It's more of
face-to-chest. It’s raining. He
whispers. Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a regular Sherlock. I
whisper back. A man handed his own. He nods, biting his lower lip and chuckles. I join. He grabs my hand
and we ran. He is jogging. I am running.

We are
not in a tropical climate anymore. The rain has turned into slate. The ground
is covered by a blinding white carpet that crunches on our feet as we run. It’s
snowing. I stop suddenly, an action that pulls him back.I look up to the sky as a few chilly flakes
fall on my face.I want to feel this. I say, almost out of breath. That is what you
get for thinking you can run (trot in my case) with an athlete. He pushes
strands of my braids from my face and wipes the snow off with a finger. Are you putting out a fire? It’s my turn
to laugh. I haven’t heard myself laugh from my soul in a long time. He is
watching me, intently. As if trying to read my answer from my thoughts before I
can say it. My eyes betray me a lot. He knows he is not going to get a direct
answer. We are in sync again. We actually do not need words. But we use them
anyway.

I could be piling on the cold. He was expecting this and has a
quick rejoinder. Your heart does not know
cold. Very matter-of-factly said. I open my mouth to counter him. He does
not let me. He grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me ever so gently. As if
trying to dislodge that thought I had poised for rebuttal and push it over the
abyss of my brain. Kill it. Correction. He starts. Your
heart knows cold. It has felt it. It just doesn't know how to process it. Cannot
even emit it. You're all fire.

My heartbeat
quickens. He has pried into my heart. It is uncomfortable. He's right. I only know fire.
It's always passionately sweltering, intensely blistering, incredibly
consuming, and absolutely sizzling hot inside me. I am fiery ball of fire inside despite the
any cool exterior façade I might project. He’s seen me. And I want to hide. He
knows this. He feels me shrink. He lets me. Slowly, he pulls me to him and holds me against him. I feel his fire. It’s explosive. His heartbeat is loud and foreign.
Heartbeats are not a sharp sound. They are a hum when the heart is at peace, and
a gentle comforting thud, like love falling gently on the hearts' surface when
restless.

His is
neither.

It’s
piercing, and scary. I want to look up at him. I want to see this face with the
strange heartbeat. He’s looking down at me, with a knowing smile. I am beginning
to think, in all the ways I shouldn't. But the sound of his heartbeat is getting louder. He moves his hands
from around me to my face. Cups it the way you would an egg.If you're into
that sort of thing.And I smile, trying hard to ignore his now screeching
heartbeat. Because I know what is coming.My eyes in my dream begin to close, the telltale sign of expectancy, as my eyes out of dream begin to open. My alarm
is going insane. I fell asleep with my phone next to my pillow.

My mind needed to get my attention. And it used the one thing I have been paying attention to. I really
need to stop watching that much football. And need to start writing more. Message home. Brain.

January 22, 2014

Not once, not not twice. So many times I get asked why I am not posting as much. The other day, someone asked me if my muse was gone. Even suggested I go to a coffee shop to get inspiration. Now that is someone who reads me far too much. I do not lack something to say. Heaven knows there is even much more going on inside my mind. It's a whirlwind in there. As I child, someone told me that if you covered a whirlwind with a basin, then uncovered it, a snake would appear. Now I never tried that, mostly because even then, I wondered who was that idle to go covering whirlwinds with basins. But that's my mind. I am scared to cover it up. I do not want to find out what happens then.I am laying on my bed in my hotel room. Hotel rooms do two things to me. Remind me that I am lonely or give me that serenity that comes from finally being alone, kicking off the jeans and the shoes, getting rid of the bra and just letting the air around me caress my body in ways that only the unseen can. I am looking out through the glass sliding doors, past the tiny porch, and out into the lake. Well, what used to be the lake. I am looking at a marsh of green, big lily-like leaves, too bulky looking to even sway in the gentle evening breeze. It was raining earlier. As I type this, the clouds are parting to let through the sun rays. So bright I have to lower my head to hide my eyes with my laptop.Marsh.I cannot see the water. But I think I can hear it. Far, beyond, somewhere deep in my mind. It could be a memory of what I once experienced, or a flashback of a sound I heard somewhere. But, its as real as if I was looking at it. It's a cry, not loud. Not weepy and needy. It's a sniffle, one that accepts helplessness, but does not accept powerlessness.

Life is what you wish you had
but you don't. It is what you see from a far and yearn for, or in some
cases, actually pursue it diligently, if only to have a taste of what
you think other out there might be enjoying. Life wheezes pass you like
that cab that won't stop when you hail, but will not hesitate to splash
muddy waters on you on the pavement. And as you watch it speed away,
you realize that you have just been dealt a very bad hand, and lady
luck has retired, not for the night, but for the decade. Every morning
on my way to work, I'm forced to stare outside the car window for long
(long is used loosely as this could stand for 2 – 5 minutes) and
sometimes, I do actually pay attention. Sometime last week, I observed,
really observed. I become aware of a small pickup truck that I meet
with at around the same time every day. It's a very nondescript car,
and you are likely to ignore it. What made me notice it were the
chickens in the back. The owners have constructed a mesh cage and
horizontally divided in into two, thus making a double storied kind of
cage. They pack chickens – hybrid broilers / or old layers on their way
to the slaughters house – that is my assumption – in these two stories.
The chickens sit quietly, almost demurely, as if cognizant of what
awaits them.

Is this any
different from my journey to work? Do the chickens also look at me and
feel that fore boarding sense of worry and pity towards me? Do they
look at me with their tiny beady eyes and wonder whether I know what
awaits me, what the day that the night worked behind the veil of
darkness to so deftly craft hold for me? Douglas Adams almost convinced
me that mice do run earth. In one of these traffic snarls, my house
mate and I got into a conversation, well more of a speculation about
Mice and Cockroaches. I will give them first Caps as this will somehow
recognize their yet-to-be-proved dominance. Cockroaches will be the
only surviving living things on the planet when we finally fry
ourselves up with UV rays and other cosmic rays and their off springs,
radioisotopes. And we wondered, is there a scientific research, maybe
in the USA, or Russia or even Japan, to make a replica of the
cockroaches shell for humans to wear protectively, when we can no
longer make higher SPF's? And Mice actually do run the universe; that
every little thing we do, no matter how ingenious is orchestrated by
Mice. Which is what got me wondering to my housemate in the car, what
of the mice that scientists conduct research on? He thought that those
were the prisoners or pariahs of the Mice kingdom, and being subjects
of us lowly brained beings is their punishment. I thought he had a
point. Imagine the lowest animal you can think of on earth, actually,
expand your thinking, in the universe. Now imagine you being condemned
to be the subject of its meaningless research.

What
I fail to understand is why you would allow yourself to be one of the
dirtiest animals on earth, especially if you controlled Earth. I mean,
look at all the advancement we have thereof. Even in my pea sized brain
(I'm looking at my brain from a Mice Point of view); I would surely
want to be a greater animal. It's like God choosing to send Jesus as a
pig to rescue the human race. I would call that very bad mathematics.
Anyway, he had a point, if far fetched at that! We could be controlled
by the lowest form of life without our knowledge. Apparently even
dolphins had a revelation of what the world was headed into (notice I
said what not where), and have been trying to tell us for years. Can't
blame me, and other human forms for not listening. Their language is
harder than Danish. And take it from me, Danish is not a language, it's
a advanced form of galactic medley of confusion (Sorry Hunny, you can
kill me later, you know how best)

Happens
that religion can explain most things and hence rest our troubled minds
as to why we exist. Science can also do that. Big Bang is where the two
meets. They fight to differ, and to me, the harder they fight the more
similar they get. Like an old married couple. Think about it, if an old
married couple to us is along the lines of 10 years to 60years (life
expectancy limits the bracket), what about centuries, and still forced
to co-habit in the same house (read Earth), deal with the same kids
(read Humans) century after century? I'm not a fan of religion. I was
born into one. And somewhere along the way I felt like a groupie on
some really confused rock band. I got the concept of what religion
tried to do, but I saw it fail. Then I wondered why I was in the
religion I professed to be in. I got one answer; because I was born
into it.

When I really
thought about it, I decided to get off the bandwagon and watch from the
sidelines. I think this is when I should confess that my not so
favourite pastime is thinking, and worrying. About things like; are
there homeless children in Alaska, whether the ant that I stepped on
accidentally this morning knew that it was going to die today, and if
so, it say a proper goodbye to its family, (I worry about that with
humans too) whether my pal knew her mother would be dead this time last
year, and if so, what would she have done differently, whether I will
celebrate my 30th birthday...anyway, that was not the line of thought I
was going to follow in this blog.

You believe
in the religion you believe in because you (your soul, your nature)
cannot accept that death is finality. There has to be something more,
otherwise, why do we bother living, why not kill ourselves and get over
with. Well, I think suicide bombers have got that covered. That is why
we go through the motions of life, because we have given ourselves
reasons to, because we humans need justifications, reasons and answers
in to Why, which when married to How , breeds very naughty children,
namely, When, Where, and the twins, What and Who. We then devote our
lives to finding answers, fighting about it, and proving the dominant
faith and downplaying the rest.

Are
the dolphins really that cleaver they might actually have something to
say that if we do not heed to, will lead us to dire straits? If we
stopped cutting into Mice and just observed them, would we learn
something valuable and hence settle the Ultimate Question? I bet if I
were to choose an animal, I would pick Ants. Sorry I know they are not
animals... for animals I would pick the pig, for its celebrated
orgasmic capabilities. But then, I figured that the only thing I have
to worry about in this life is living to the ultimate satisfaction in
everything I do, as I don't know what awaits me ahead, and if I spent
too much time worrying, fighting and arguing about it, I'll lose on the
best things.

Busy as I
may claim to be enjoying the best of things, I do worry though; I'm
still human, no matter how hard I fight it. Do I worry about religion?
Yes. Why? Because it was ingrained in me from the day I learnt the
difference between the beauty of fire from a far and the beauty of fire
on my fingers. And just when I convince myself that I have safely
crossed to the other side without the proverbial troll riding and
digging deep into my back, it sinks it claws, from whatever end of my
body it was hanging on to. But then I have that special innate ability
to be stubborn, even unto myself. Don't' forget that other special gift
of not being able to concentrate on anything for more than the time my
brain will allow. It selective on what it really wants to concentrate
on and there is nothing I can do about that, in this case, thankfully!

Making
excuses is not my specialty. But I do like listening to them and
wondering how best I would have put it, were it left to me. And by
gawd, I would have an excuse for everything in the universe, and to me,
everything interconnects. By some cosmic power of pulling elements
towards the centre of the earth, all things hurtle towards each other,
like the Bermuda Triangle, only at a slower pace. Religion, politics,
relationships, business, war... all of it. It's all to satisfying so
sort of deficient.

A
quest by the human race to prove something to each other, to
themselves. Unexplainable does not mean inexplicable. Just because
something is unexplainable does not mean that paranormal forces must
have been involved, only that we haven't found the explanation for it
yet. I could start a whole school of thought and argument with true and
untrue theories in accordance with that statement, but I'm not that
inspired today. Take it as it is, mull over it in your sleep.

Living without
knowing what you are here for, what your purpose in life is, where you
are headed is frustrating. Which is why we have higher stress levels
that any other living organism. That elevated stress level of animals,
say a chimp will be to find it's tree cut down, or it's favorite spot
occupied by a pride of lions. Why don't you try for a change, just not
think about anything? Live today like you don't have another day like
this. Actually, you don't. Today is never a continuation of yesterday,
and neither will it ever be a prelude to tomorrow. Different entities,
like you and your parents or siblings. You are related, but you are not
the extension of any of your family, not even your twin. Think of the
days septets, their mother being the week they fall in, their father
the month. In the end you will have a father that has 4 wives, and each
has 7 kids. Now take 11 more families like that and you have a clan
called Year. The only relationship they have? Association by marriage,
birth, nothing more.

This blog was not about religion, life,
etc. It was about nothing really. It was my weird way of trying to
prove something. Now as you were busy reading this, you failed to
notice that the first words of every paragraph formed a sentence: Life Is What Happens When You Are Busy Making A Living. Get my drift?

December 19, 2012

I have been trying to hear myself think for the past one hour. I cannot. Yet I cannot even make out the conversations around me. Coffee shops make me want to write. Because, somehow, I can immerse myself in my world of words and still be present to what is happening around me. And just then, I am in my own little nirvana.

Today, my world of words rejects me, the ability to be present escapes me. It is like the that… that thing… that ability… that essence…. that makes me lost yet very present has been taken away. Now all I am is aware. Aware of the girl next to me whose phone has been fixed firmly on her ear since she walked in, gave me a quick questioning look as to whether she can share my table. See, normally, I would have noted her as she walked into Java. I would have discussed her in my mind, as my fingers flew across my keyboard going on and on about the guy who shared with me his phone charger. If I had written about him I would have told you how he looked like he loves she who does not love him back. She who makes him wait in coffee shops only to claim that she cannot make it. I would have been thinking about how light the vinegarette they gave me with my chicken strip salad was. I would have been in three places, at the same time. Now i am just in one. Not inside myself, not inside other people's minds. Just aware. Watching, but not really feeling.

As I write this, I am aware of the words I am choosing. I am typing deliberately. This is a foreign feeling. Words fly from that part of the brain they reside to my fingers. I watch them not the screen as you would if you were standing behind me. I am never in control.

Control.

See, I am actually not in control of anything right now. I don't even know how to explain this. To me.

To you.

*Started this post a last week. And couldn't finish. I am not going to finish it.